Productivity is Fun
Instrumentalized Pleasure and Digital Lifestyles
Martin Roberts
The Internet as Playground and Factory: A Conference on Digital Labor
Eugene Lang College / The New School
12-14 November 2009
Ceci n’est pas un papier
I’ve been asked not to read a “paper” because it’s just not fun, but since my “presentation” is in large degree a critique of Fun, it only seems appropriate to read a paper, not just to be mean but as a way of trying to show that reading a paper doesn’t have to be not fun. Before I hear groans from the audience, however <audience groans>, let me reassure you that although I will be reading part of what follows, you will still, hopefully, get your expected fix of Fun. For those unable to remain awake during the reading sections, ushers are standing by to douse you with buckets of iced water should the need arise.
I. Preamble
This project is part of an ongoing research interest of mine in lifestyle media, “lifestyle” here being defined as a form of reflexive identity specific to modernity in which the self is constructed through practices of consumption, and the role of lifestyle media is both to promote such models of identity and to stigmatize deviations from them.
Of particular interest to me in this context is the notion of digital lifestyles, dispersed throughout the discourse networks of electronic media from tech blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget to a never-ending stream of podcasts reviewing the latest tech “toys,” and their construction of technocultural capital as the latest episode of Pierre Bourdieu’s long-running soap-opera, Distinction. The emergence of a battery of new terms based on the word “life,”
One word which recurs with a mantra-like insistency in the discourse on productivity is the word fun, a word which until quite recently has not been generally associated with productivity. Nevertheless, we are today regularly reminded not only that productivity itself is, or should be, fun, and that having fun is about being productive. Consider a typical example from one of the best-known productivity blogs: <SLIDE: ZEN HABITS> Fun here becomes a form of instrumentalized pleasure, literally put to work as a kind of Jedi mind trick designed to make us feel better about work, which as we can see here includes the (often uncompensated) work of producing blogs about productivity. I understand that a lot of people these days get paid to have fun, and I suppose that if there’s one thing better than having fun, it’s getting paid to have fun. But there’s still something rather insidious, rather coercive, about these continual injunctions to “have fun.” Whose interests, we may wonder, is our Fun ultimately serving? The disappearing distinction between labor and leisure in the digital economy - one of the major themes of this conference - is by now a truism, perhaps best exemplified in the much-discussed example of the Chinese gold farmers. The digital fun of playing videogames, it seems, is no longer fun when you have to play for 12 hour shifts to collect enough virtual capital to convert into real-world capital so you can make a living. In some ways, the equation between productivity and fun can be seen as a logical outcome of this elision between labor and leisure: if Fun has usually been more often associated with Play than Work, when Play becomes Work, Work becomes Fun. [SLIDE] Fun is one of the dominant values of the contemporary global culture industries, comparable in its polymorphousness and its ideological power to terms such as “cool.” Also characteristic of postmodernity in its emphases on superficiality, speed, and ephemerality: Fun does not require of its subjects a serious, sustained engagement; it skims lightly across surfaces; it is the quick fix. Its most typical form today is perhaps the late-night talkshow host’s monolog, which at the end of the working day pokes harmless fun at events in the “real” worlds of politics, the economy, and celebrity culture.
Rather than a social obligation, having fun is today a form of citizenship, an indicator of responsible participation in society: if you aren’t having fun, there must be something wrong with you. To question the legitimacy of Fun, then, is to engage in a kind of heresy, even blasphemy, to risk being labelled a curmudgeon, a killjoy, or - worst of all - an elitist. We need to ignore such charges, at least provisionally, and look for support to other heretics braver and smarter than ourselves. We need a curmudgeon. In short, we need Adorno.
II. A Brief History of Fun
The debate about Fun has to date taken place on the terrain of consumption rather than production, in the opposition between the commodified products of the culture industry and art, and is most often associated with the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno. In Adorno’s writings on the culture industry, as Erica Weitzman suggests in a recent article, Fun
usually functions . . . as a kind of cipher for the emptiest and most mind-numbing experiences of the culture industry’s relentlessly amusing products (186).